After the Council of Blachernae in 1285, his father was condemned and exiled, and Metochites seems to have spent his adolescence in the monastic milieux of Bithynia in Asia Minor.

Besides carrying out his political duties (embassies to Cilicia in 1295 and to Serbia in 1299), Metochites continued to study and to write.

Some of the money was spent on restoring and decorating the church of the Chora monastery in the northwest of Constantinople, where Metochites' donor portrait can still be seen in a famous mosaic in the narthex, above the entrance to the nave.

Metochites' extant œuvre comprises 20 Poems in dactylic hexameter, 18 orations (Logoi), Commentaries on Aristotle's writings on natural philosophy, an introduction to the study of Ptolemaic astronomy (Stoicheiosis astronomike), and 120 essays on various subjects, the Semeioseis gnomikai.

"Jeffrey Michael Featherstone (Introduction, Text and Translation), Theodore Metochites’s poems 'to Himself' [Byzantina vindobonensia, XXIII], Wien : Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2000", Scriptorium 56, p. 328*-330*([1]) Editions without translation: Lauritzen, Frederick.